How rest of the world is sponsoring China's defence researches

My article How rest of the world is sponsoring China's defence researches appeared in The Mail Today/DailyO

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Since 2007, the PLA has sent more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad and has developed relationships with researchers and institutions across the globe.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), an independent think tank, recently published a research paper entitled “Picking flowers, making honey: The Chinese military’s collaboration with foreign universities.”
The author, Alex Joske, a scholar associated with the International Cyber Policy Centre, argued: “Since 2007, the PLA has sponsored more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad and has developed relationships with researchers and institutions across the globe. This collaboration is highest in the Five Eyes countries, Germany and Singapore, and is often unintentionally supported by taxpayer funds.”

Scientific export
The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In order to make ‘honey’ at home, the PLA is picking ‘flowers’ abroad.
Per capita, Australia has the highest level of PLA collaboration among the Five Eyes countries, “at six times the level in the US. Nearly all PLA scientists sent abroad are Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members who return to China on time. Dozens of PLA scientists have obscured their military affiliations to travel to Five Eyes countries and the European Union, including at least 17 to Australia, where they work in areas such as hypersonic missiles and navigation technology.”
These countries are not China’s security allies, “but rather their main intelligence adversaries.”
Navigation technology, computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) are “the dominant areas of exchanges …and statistics on Chinese researchers who were sent abroad,” says the report which quoted the example of Wang Zhenguo, deputy chief of the PLA’s scramjet programme at the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT); Wang coauthored 18 papers with foreign scientists.
It is also said that several researchers visited UK universities for “joint research on topics such as combustion in scramjet engines, which could power hypersonic aircraft capable of flying at six times the speed of sound.”
Huang Wei, a NUDT’s aircraft design expert, working for the PLA’s General Armaments Department, did his PhD in the University of Leeds between 2008 and 2010, while Luo Wenlei, another NUDT scholar, wrote his thesis on scramjet engines at Leeds in 2014.
All courtesy the British tax payers.
Amazing, no?
One question immediately comes to mind: what about India? While there is practically no investigative journalism in India, most of the universities are in a lethargic state and can’t compare in terms of research with the Five Eyes’ institutions or other Western universities.
Little ‘honey’ can be expected in these conditions.

Cyber spying
It is not that China is dormant. Zee TV News, quoting Indian intelligence sources, recently reported that a PLA unit was active in India: “Cyberwarfare activities have indicated that the secret PLA military Unit 61398 is responsible for cyberwarfare and is currently involved in geolocation intelligence collection, tracking information sources in cyberspace, interception and deciphering of digital communication,” said the news channel.
Unit 61398 is headquartered in Shanghai, and groups of hackers are suspected to be active in India, “involved in cyber spying with the help of Chinese intelligence officers”.
The intelligence officer who spoke to Zee News said, “The hackers of Unit 61398 are using malware to steal information by using Ice Bag, Hidden Lynx and APT and also different types of Trojan Malware, a professional advanced persistent threat [APT] programme.” APT not only seeks access to a server, but also tries to retain a long-term, ongoing access. Unit 61398 comes under the PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF), the new service responsible for space and cyber warfare. According to an assessment of FireEye, a cyber-security firm, Unit 61398 has stolen “hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organisations around the world, targeting a wide range of industries such as aerospace, transportation, health care, and financial services sectors.”

Aggressive front
The main reason for these aggressive techniques is that by 2030, China wants to catch up with the United States, in the domain of defence, literally at any cost.
The recently held Zhuhai Airshow in China is an example.
The PLA Air Force showed off its flagship fifth-generation stealth fighter, the J-20.
“Large swaths of the ensuing commentary focused on the J-20’s handling and maneuverability as it performed a series of rolls and a climb. But this elides what is perhaps the most significant aspect of the J-20’s Zhuhai showing: its weapons system,” wrote Wendell Minnick, a Taipei-based journalist on security issues, in National Interest.
The J-20 opened its missile bay doors to reveal four PL-15 missiles and two PL-10 missiles on either side. The PL-15, with a reported maximum range of 300 km, is a long range air-to-air missile using ‘active electronically scanned radar’; it is slated to enter service in 2018.
Among the other new gadgets displayed there, a vehicle-based laser weapon, called LW-30 was seen on the stand of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC).
According to The Global Times, the LW-30 laser defense weapon system “could use a directional-emission high-energy laser to quickly intercept many kinds of aerial targets, such as photoelectric guidance equipment, drones, guided bombs, and mortars.”
It will be installed on the Tibetan plateau and used against India, experts noted.
India does not have the mindset and the means to undertake such hyper-aggressive weapon development, but a middle path approach would help to reduce the gap with China, before it becomes insurmountable. Homemade honey with Indian flowers may take some time.

What China can teach us on research

My article What China can teach us on research appeared in Daily Mail/Mail Today.

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During his report to the 19th CPC National Congress, President Xi Jinping disclosed his plans for the future of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA): "We will make it our mission to see that by 2035, the modernization of our national defense and our forces is basically complete; and that by the mid-21st century our people's armed forces have been fully transformed into world-class forces.”
The Chinese media announced: “As chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi is tasked with ensuring the world's largest military take a ‘crucial leap’ in the new era from being simply large to being strong.”
A few weeks earlier, The South China Morning Post wrote about ‘China building giant facial recognition database to identify any citizen’.
The project is to achieve an accuracy rate of 90%, though it faces formidable technological hurdles and there are serious concerns about privacy. The powerful facial recognition system should be able to identify 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds.
Chen Jiansheng, of the department of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University told the Hong Kong newspaper that the government will use this system to track wanted suspects as well as for public administration.
In April 2107, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report, ‘Artificial Intelligence: Implications for China’ which describes the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI): “the idea that computer systems can perform functions typically associated with the human mind, has gone from futuristic speculation to present-day reality.”
The report further elaborated: “Thanks to advances in data collection and aggregation, algorithms, and processing power, computer scientists have achieved significant breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Where computer systems once had to be programmed to execute rigidly defined tasks, they can now be given a generalized strategy for learning, enabling them to adapt to new data inputs without being explicitly reprogrammed.”
In the years to come, the PLA plans to benefit from AI to enhance its efficiency ‘to win wars’ and reach the objectives fixed by Xi Jinping.
Elsa Kania from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) noted in a recent report: “China is no longer in a position of technological inferiority relative to the United States but rather has become a true peer (competitor) that may have the capability to overtake the United States in AI,” she adds: “it could alter future economic and military balances of power.”
The main use of AI is part of the in-depth reforms of China’s defence forces for a wider ‘integration’ of the different services which are now five. At par with the PLA Ground Forces, Navy and Air Force, are the PLA Rocket Force (formerly, the second artillery) and the Strategic Support Force (SSF), a game changer, according to all observers. The use of AI will come under the umbrella of the PLASSF.
The Diplomat noted a few months back: “While the Chinese PLA’s new SSF is a critical force for dominance in the space, cyber, and electromagnetic domains …the SSF’s function of ‘strategic support’, namely information support, will be equally vital to the PLA’s capabilities to fight and win wars.”
Apart from restructuring the commands, Xi Jinping also wants to give a boost to the Research and Development (R&D) to catch up with the United States in terms of new weaponry in the decades to come.
A couple of weeks ago, the Chinese Central Television (CCTV) broadcast a TV documentary about the ten aircraft carriers planned by China. Jane’s Review reported that Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) will “be fitted onto the second of the country’s indigenously built aircraft carriers, commonly referred to as the Type 002,” the system is similar to the EMALS used by the United States.
A lot of money is also poured into the Hypersonic Vehicle Technology Project; available data shows that China has started developing conceptual and experimental hypersonic flight vehicle technologies such as hypersonic cruise vehicles (HCV) capable of maneuvering at Mach 5 speeds (6,150 km/h), flying in near-space altitudes. It could be another game changer.
Cutting-edge research in the field of quantum communication (which will make communications un-hackable) is also undertaken by the Chinese scientists. The Academy of Military Sciences explicitly asserted: “Space and cyberspace increasingly constitute important battlefields. A new type of five-dimensional battle-space of land, sea, air, space, and cyber is currently taking shape, which is wide in scope, hyper-dimensional, and combines the tangible and intangible.”
The list of new fields of research is long.
China is for example working on an unmanned combat aerial vehicle named the ‘Black Sword’, which could one day compete with the best US drones.
New materials such as smart materials and structures, high-temperature superconducting technologies, and highly efficient energy materials technologies.
Beijing has a medium and long-term programme which aims at transforming China into an ‘innovation-oriented society’ by 2020; the plan defines China’s leading-edge technologies.
Beijing has also ‘megaprojects for assimilating and absorbing’ technology; an import substitution action plan in order to create indigenous innovations through ‘co-innovation’ and ‘re-innovation’ of foreign technologies.
In all probability, the Israeli Heron drone which recently fell in Chinese hands in Chumbi Valley in Tibet will soon be ‘assimilated and absorbed’.
Xi Jinping has a Dream, the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation: “It is an unstoppable historical trend that won't be diverted by the will of any individual country or person,” asserts China Military Online.
India has something to learn from the Middle Kingdom in terms of looking into the future. It is however doubtful if the Indian public sector has the dynamism to catch up with China. The time has perhaps come for the Modi Sarkar to start a new scheme, ‘Research in India’ and involve the private sector. AI could be the first field of research.

Research in China

My article Research in China has been published by Uday India.

It was recently reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was extremely unhappy about the state of affairs at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
According to The Times of India, when he visited the DRDO headquarters on August 20, Modi “has asked the tardy organisation to shape-up in the face of competition from the private sector”.
Modi asked the defence minister to conduct a detailed review of the DRDO, and eventually come out with a white paper.
Modi also asked the officers to give up their ‘chalta hai’ (lackadaisical) attitude.
It appears that 15 top DRDO scientists, including Director General Avinash Chander are on extension; Chander holds three posts — Secretary (Defence) R&D, DG (DRDO) and Scientific Advisor to the defence minister.
A senior defence ministry official told The Times of India: "The PM was not happy about [this]. As per a department of personnel and training (DoPT) ruling, only the best scientists of international stature should be considered for extensions. He asked for all the details. He was told about the high attrition rate among the younger scientists."
The daily remarked: “DRDO spokesperson Ravi Gupta could not be contacted for a comment”; ‘Missing in Action’ in Army terms.
In the meantime, China takes giant strides to catch up with the US in the field of military innovations.
Xinhua reported that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would soon take delivery of a new generation’s aerial drone.
CCTV showed a test flight of the Rainbow 4 (CH-4), a hunter-killer drone, which successfully hit a target with a missile. The new CH-4 has been developed for reconnaissance and military strikes by the China Aerospace Science and Technology.
Li Pingkun, the head of the CH-4 project, told CCTV that the new drone could fly long-distance and hit a target with a error margin of less than 1.5 metres. Li explained that the precision was due to several new original ways to guide the missiles (or smart bombs) to their target.
The South China Morning Post, quoting some reports in the mainland, said: “The Rainbow 4 was developed as the PLA's answer to the MQ-9 Reaper, a hunter-killer drone mainly used by the US military for reconnaissance and high-precision air strikes”.
The nine metres long CH-4 has an 18-metre wingspan. With its 40-hour autonomy, it can carry four missiles, while its ground control centre can be fitted on two trucks.
Can the CH-4 catch up with the US Reaper in terms of targeting precision, flight length and payloads? Certainly not as yet, though intense efforts are being put in the project by Chinese scientists.
If today the Reaper can fly at 740km/h, the Chinese drone’s maximum speed is 235km/h, but the Chinese project is progressing fast.
But that is not all.
Have you heard of 'supercavitation' technology?
During the cold war, Soviet scientists had developed a technology called ‘supercavitation’, by which a submerged vessel would proceed inside an air bubble to avoid water drag.
Theoretically, a supercavitating vessel could reach the speed of sound, and this underwater; it would reduce the time for a transatlantic underwater cruise to less than an hour and for a transpacific journey to about 100 minutes.
Today, it may be science-fiction, but the Chinese scientists are working hard to solve the many technical hurdles.
The South China Morning Post explains: “China has moved a step closer to creating a supersonic submarine that could travel from Shanghai to San Francisco in less than two hours.”
It is hard to believe, but a team of scientists at Harbin Institute of Technology's Complex Flow and Heat Transfer Lab has made some breakthrough which should help a submarine, or a torpedo, to travel at extremely high speeds underwater.
Li Fengchen, professor of fluid machinery and engineering, announced that the new technology “could create the complicated air ‘bubble’ required for rapid underwater travel.”
Well, it is not done, but China is working on it.
Li affirmed that his team has found innovative means of addressing some of the unresolved problems: “Our method is different from any other approach, such as vector propulsion, or thrust created by an engine. By combining liquid-membrane technology with supercavitation, we can significantly reduce the launch challenges and make cruising control easier.”
In future the supercavitation technology will not be limited to military use only; it could also be utilized for civilian projects.
Professor Wang Guoyu, of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Beijing Institute of Technology admits huge scientific and engineering challenges: “The size of the bubble is difficult to control, and the vessel is almost impossible to steer. While cruising at high speed during supercavitation, a fin could be snapped off if it touched the water because of the liquid's far greater density.”
There is more. The Chinese press recently conducted the second flight test of a new, ultra-high-speed missile. Analysts believe that it is part of a global system of attack weapons capable of striking the United States with nuclear warheads.
The flight of the new hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) or Wu-14 took place August 7 at a missile facility in western China.
The Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jeffrey Pool stated: “We routinely monitor foreign defense activities, however we don’t comment on our intelligence or assessments of foreign weapons systems.”
He however confirmed a first test of the Wu-14 in January, though declined to provide a similar confirmation on the second test.
According to The South China Morning Post: “The first flight test of the Wu-14 took place January 9 and flew at speeds of around Mach 10, or 10 times the speed of sound—around 7,680 miles per hour. Hypersonic speeds pose severe guidance and control challenges for weapons engineers and produce extreme stress to metal and components.”
The US intelligence circles see this as an emerging hypersonic arms race.
The Chinese press did not mention the August 7 test, but reports about the presumed Wu-14 launch appeared on Internet which mentioned a missile launched from the Jiuquan satellite launch facility located in the Gobi Desert. Further, reports and photos posted online indicated that the booster rocket used in the test crash landed in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
The booster crash is consistent with a hypersonic test.
Hypersonic glide vehicles travel in near space and thus the rocket that launched it may not have left the atmosphere.
The Pentagon has tested several hypersonic weapons platforms such as the X-37B Space Plane, the Lockheed Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 or the Boeing’s hypersonic craft known as the X-51 WaveRider.
What worries the US defence establishment are the sharp Pentagon budget cuts which may strike the funding for U.S. hypersonic craft.
In the meantime, President Xi Jinping (who is also Chairman of the Central Military Commission) spoke a ‘new military revolution’: "The new military revolution has provided China with opportunities and challenges at the same time and we must have foresight to adapt to changes in warfare.”
He was addressing his 24 colleagues of the Political Bureau
Xi asked Communist Party members to devote more attention to military issues, national defense and military development and military preparedness, and to support national defense and military reforms. The message is clear. Further, according to Xinhua, Xi said: “The changes will include developing new military strategies, technologies, doctrines, combat forces and management models with military informatization being central to modern combat.
Xi also mentioned four principles of comprehensive planning for military ‘renovation’. The Party should formulate an overall strategy to enhance its military strength:

• by developing a new mindset for the different military departments
• by uniting under a coherent strategy,
• by adopting a coordinated approach to innovation, and
• by fostering independent innovation.

The CMC Chairman added: “The new military revolution is developing at a pace so fast and with its impact so broad and profound that has rarely been seen since the end of WWII. The Chinese military must make great leaps in development and innovation so as to close the gap with its better-developed peers in the world.
He further urged the integration of military and civilian innovation “so that the two can accommodate each other and develop together”.
It is time for DRDO (and HAL) to wake up from their slumber. The world is moving; China is progressing fast, India will be left behind.
A solution might be to split DRDO into several autonomous projects with orders to deliver the goods.